Guadalcanal Diary Part Two - Start - Stop

I've been meaning to do some 1942 IJN for a bit and Gisli's post just gave me the impetus. I ordered some decals from the ever reliable MiscMinis in the States. I already had the A6M3s from the Planeprinter Patreon in my "to paint" pile, and badgered Paul Davison into printing some G4Ms as my printer is a bit too small to do them comfortably.

I've always struggled with the IJN colours - not just the grey green white (whatever) but also the dark green. I decided to order some Tamiya paint - that should deal with the issue, right? Ideally I would have ordered some of Steve Toth's Blue Falcon Hobbies paint, but the last package from Steve got picked up by HM Customs and they demanded £50(!) to hand over 3 paint dropper bottles, so I had to go with plan B - Tamiya.

The Tamiya IJN Grey arrived and was duly used on six A6M2s and six A6M3s. I'm not that keen on the Tamiya paints - I'm sure with the right techniques and skills they're great, but my slap it on style doesn't seen to get good coverage, and while I am sure they're perfect on 1:48 scale, they look a bit dark on 1:200....

Then the decals for the Zeros arrived. Kevin Hammond at MiscMinis did a great job as always with these, however he included tail markings and fuselage stripes in batches of four (historically correct). As I had six planes this would mean a Chutai (flight) of four and another of two. I was also toying with the idea of doing one pair in the transitional grey plus hastily applied green splodges camo seen at the time, so maybe the logical choice was to do two groups of four?  I did have some "spares" from batch printing so two more were dug out and hastily undercoated. Having a 3d printer is marvelous but also makes you quite profligate. Ah well

So while I'm waiting for the Zeros to dry I started on the Bettys. They're big girls and there is a lot of glass to paint. I'm painting these in the lazy monotone IJN Dark Green - Tamiya again, and again I think they came out a bit too dark. Not sure if I need to maybe try a drybrush highlight?